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relatives. In the children's ward, the
nurses and the nuns doted on a pretty
eight-year-old girl named Viviana, who
had been paralyzed from the waist down
in an air strike the previous July.
The men's ward was full of fighters
who had been shot, maimed, or burned.
One athletic man in his early twenties
had lost both legs in an explosion.
Smiling brightly as he propelled him-
self around in a wheelchair, he told
Catena that he felt ready to return to
his home, in Toroge, another front-
line village. Catena told him that it was
O.K., but he would not be able to take
the wheelchair with him; there was no
way for the hospital to replace it, and
new patients came every day. The
young man looked stricken. Catena
said, "I'm sorry, but we need it here,"
and walked away.
C atena's first operation the next
morning was an old man with ad-
vanced melanoma. Mter giving him an
anesthetic, Catena amputated his rot-
ting left leg. By late afternoon, he had
banged a steel spike into the leg of a
young man to set his fractured femur,
and operated on a boy of twelve whose
left hand had been mangled when a gre-
nade he was playing with exploded.
We left the O.R. at 7 P.M. An hour
later, just as the staff was sitting down
to dinner, the first casualties of the
Talodi offensive arrived; the
Antonovs we'd heard had ap-
parently been on their way to
support Khartoum's troops.
The wounded fighters lay in
the back of a truck, having en-
dured a journey of many
hours. In the operating room,
I found Catena attending to a
naked man; a wound in his ab-
domen was being dressed, and
his bloody left arm was tied
with a tourniquet just above
the elbow. Wielding a hot scalpel,
rather like a soldering tool, Catena
began cutting a bright red line into the
man's biceps. After about twenty min-
utes, the arm came off and was tossed
into a bin.
One by one, Catena tended to the
wounded men. There were eleven in
all; some had been hit by bullets, others
by shrapnel. The soldiers said that the
S.P.L.A. had attacked the government-
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58 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 23, 2012
held villages that ringed Talodi and
broken through the defenses, but the
fighting continued. They gave off the
acrid smell of the battlefield-nervous
sweat, urine, dust, and blood-and
they were parched. The previous night,
they had hiked for twelve hours in
order to sneak up on their target, and
had fought all day, while the Antonovs
bombed them.
More trucks arrived; in the next six
hours, thirty-three casualties came in
from Talodi. The hall outside the oper-
ating room :filled up with soldiers, who
collapsed on beds next to other patients
and lay there, waiting to be seen. The
hospital took on a frenetic air, as nurses
came running with I.V.s and syringes
and bandages; there was blood every-
where. Catena did triage, and turned to
a soldier who had been hit by a bullet in
the buttock. Even after Catena treated
the wound, the soldier complained of
pain in his stomach, so Catena gave him
an anesthetic and opened him up. The
bullet had travelled on into his guts and
had made twenty distinct holes, each of
which needed to be sewn closed to pre-
vent peritonitis. When Catena finished,
it was 2 A.M., and there was still another
gut-shot man to deal with.
After two hours of sleep, Catena
was back in the O.R. Incredibly, every-
one had survived. That day, five more
casualties were brought in, all hurt in a
land-mine explosion. One
young man's head was gro-
tesquely swollen, his face cov-
ered with scores of holes;
where his eyes had been, there
was just a bloody mash.
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ð
T he next morning, General
J ogot Mekwar arranged
for me to visit a front-line po-
sition near Talodi. He as-
signed an intelligence man,
Korme, to join me, and, after
waiting until noon for a pair of An-
tonovs to go away, we drove toward the
front. We passed through burned-out
villages and, moving at high speed for
fear of being detected by the govern-
ment's planes, we arrived at a former
regime base called Maflu-little more
than a bivouac at the base of a hill,
where a couple of baobabs gave shade.
The rebels had captured the base a few
days earlier, establishing their first po-
sition near T alodi. Korme had been the
advance scout. He had gone in by foot
at night, crossing the mountain above
the camp. "We first came to see, and
then our forces came from two sides,"
he said. The base had held about three
hundred and fifty men. When I asked
where they were now, he said, "They
ran away." The place now swarmed
with rebel fighters, and the atmosphere
was tense. The sun was stupendously
hot, and a trench that surrounded the
base gave off a smell like that of dead
bodies.
I was taken to the commander,
Brigadier Nimeiri Murad, a husky, un-
smiling young man, who sat under one
of the baobabs with his officers; they
stopped talking when I approached.
Nimeiri told me that his men had been
making forays into the town, and, de-
spite their worried looks, he said, "The
situation is very good. It's going well."
He pointed to a spot a couple of miles
across the narrow plain, where a few
roofs stood above the bush at the base
of a large massif. "That's T alodi," he
. d " 0 h 1:" Th . ,
sal. ne our on loot. e regIme s
troops were dug into the town, he said,
while his men were arrayed around it
in the lowlands and on the djebel, the
great stone ridge that loomed several
hundred feet above it. But his fighters
were low on water, and not prepared
for a long siege. As we spoke, he kept
looking through binoculars toward
the town.
An officer who introduced him-
self as Lieutenant Colonel Abras told
me that his soldiers had fought their
way into Talodi. ''Yesterday, from 8 to
5 P.M., we were inside there," he said.
The officers said that the regime's sol-
diers had heavy machine guns, mortars,
artillery, bazookas. Abras said, "In
T alodi, they also have a gun we call
American Dog." He described it as a
long-range field piece, made in the
U.S., which had several barrels that
could fire simultaneously. 'When they
use it, it stops our vehicle engines for
ten or fifteen minutes." Korme said, "It
has a chemical. When the American
Dog fires near them, some of the sol-
diers even start vomiting." The men
were vague about how exactly they had
taken Maflu in the face of such an ad-
vantage, but, a mile or so away, I had
seen four Russian tanks concealed in